The Magic of Time Travel

Why we long to "go home" again.

I loved this conversation with Amanda Konopacki, author of Monday’s guest post in the Breadcrumbs Project series. She grew up in an old New England farmhouse and beautifully described her childhood home to me, both the outside and inside, and told me about how development has changed the landscape of her parents’ home over the past decade. Amanda had the opportunity to bring her daughters back to her childhood home for the first time a few summers ago, and her essay shared a snapshot of that experience. We talk about that in more detail in our interview, the experience of bringing our children to “see where Mama grew up,” and what it feels like to show our children where we came from, both literally and through the stories we tell and the way we live.

Something Amanda said made me realize what it is I’ve always longed for, the thing that compelled me to go back to all my homes and write my memoir—It’s my ever-present desire to time travel, not necessarily to a specific time or place, but rather to revisit that specific version of ME that exists in that peach bedroom back in 1985, etc. It’s a longing to return to an old version of self, not forever, but just for a visit, to remember, to understand.

When Amanda went back home, she got a little bit of that magic. Paid subscribers can read on to hear what she experienced, and join our conversation about what it means to go back home, and how it feels to begin to teach our children that we are whole people, not just mothers. During the month of December, it’s only $30 to become a paid subscriber for a whole year, so consider this a great opportunity to support The Breadcrumbs Project and memoir efforts in general!

Steph:

So, more about the project—I’m writing a memoir, and the memoir idea was born when I went to say goodbye to my childhood home—which was kind of the big one—we moved into that house when I was 13, and my parents had lived there until almost 10 years ago.

So every time I would go home, that was the touchstone for me, and we would stay there. And so it felt like a big deal. But we'd moved around a lot when I was a kid. And then, you know, you go to college and you have your dorm room and your crappy first apartment. . . And I was like, oh, I want to go visit all of the places.

And so that's where the idea came from, but I love talking to people about childhood homes and, and the significance of it. And I'm always curious if other people have attachments to their childhood homes. Or if it was really like, I loaded up a two-year-old and a very anxious seven-year-old into a minivan and like drove during the winter to say goodbye to a house, like do normal people do that?